Depths: Southern Watch #2 (31 page)

“Well, goddamn,” Hendricks said in a little whisper.

“I’m afraid this one’s all on Gideon, actually,” Spellman said to Hendricks.

“And the guy who gave him the fucking conjuring,” Lerner said, hot enough that he would have let the air out of Spellman right here, if he hadn’t been a fucking screen. “Why didn’t you give him a fake if you’re so concerned about saving your damned business?”

Spellman shrugged lightly. “I have a guarantee. He ordered a product, I delivered it. Whatever happens to him after that is entirely out of my hands. I just wanted to make sure he didn’t leave a bad review on Yelp.” Spellman looked almost apologetic. “Those things will hurt sales faster than—”

“Oh, fuck off,” Lerner said, and he started to pace. “You put a bomb in the hands of a psychotic Sygraath, and now he’s—” He shot a look at Duncan. “Come on, let’s get to the dam.”

“I can’t see him,” Duncan said in a soft tone.

“I fucking know that!” Lerner said. “I need you to read the map and tell me where to go.” He snapped his fingers and made for the door. He caught sight of Hendricks heading toward him and held out a hand. “Not this time, junior. Sygraath’s a greater; he’ll pop your head off and drink your blood out like you’re a growler of ale. Sounds like he’s getting a taste for it, too.”

“You need all the help you can get,” Hendricks said, and he staggered and swayed as he took a couple steps.

“I need help from someone who can fucking stand up straight,” Lerner said, and he knew he’d snapped at the cowboy. He didn’t care. He had shit to do, humans to save, status quo to maintain, and some wobbly demon hunter wasn’t getting in his way. “Stay here and sleep it off.” He shot out the door and headed for the car.

He could hear Duncan pause in the threshold behind him. “Drink it,” he said, and Lerner wondered what he was talking about. But he didn’t wonder long because Duncan was out behind him a hot second later, and Lerner already had the car going. They peeled out of the parking lot as fast as the wet tires on the watery road would allow.

* * *

Arch heard the phone ring as he sat silently on the couch next to Alison. It was his personal cell phone, he could tell by the plain tone. Not that he had a different or fancy tone for his personal one, it was just a different default ringer. He looked at Alison apologetically, but she still wasn’t looking at him. She was just staring off into space, had been for the last fifteen or twenty minutes.

“Hello?” he asked. He hadn’t checked the number first.

“Arch,” Hendricks’s voice came over the line. He sounded frantic but slurred. “We figured out what the Sygraath is up to.”

“Great,” he said, giving his wife an apologetic look that she didn’t even notice and getting up to walk toward the bedroom. “What now?”

“He’s gonna blow up that dam you showed me the other night,” Hendricks’s reply came. “Flood the whole town, feast on all the souls passing into the … I don’t know, afterlife or void or whatever.”

Arch felt his eyes slide back and forth, real slow. “When?”

“Well, he’s already up there, I think, so—”

“On my way,” Arch said. He didn’t even have to think, it was just instinct. “I’ll pick you up on the way, so you better be ready.” He hit the end button and ran for the door. “Gotta go!” he called to his wife as he passed. He had no idea if she even noticed he was leaving.

* * *

Erin took the long way back to the station. She’d wanted to avoid some of the roads that were starting to flood over, figuring that with the rain coming down they’d be bad again, so she’d gone up and caught the interstate on the far edge of town and was following it back to the Old Jackson Highway exit. The rain was constant, pelting the windshield as her wipers squealed in a steady rhythm to keep it clear enough for her to see.

She’d settled into an easy silence with Lucia, and was still trying to work out in her head if the girl was lying, nuts or actually telling the truth. The latter seemed crazy, but she was a dead ringer for Starling, and—

Erin stopped at the light at the top of the exit ramp as she heard tires squealing to her right over a crack of thunder overhead. Pulling out of the Sinbad’s parking lot was the sedan that those two peckerwoods who had been parked outside the murder scene were driving. They blew down the Old Jackson Highway in one hell of a hurry, violating the speed limit as they headed toward the hills—the opposite direction from where she was supposed to be going.

She took a long breath, trying to decide what to do. Unconsciously, her hand reached down to the switch for the siren and lights and she flipped them. “Hold on,” she said to Lucia, whose face was a mask of uncertainty as Erin jerked the wheel to the right and headed after the sedan.

* * *

Hendricks stared at the thing in his hand. He had some doubts about drinking out of a cow’s bladder.

“It’s been boiled,” Spellman said, watching him. “You needn’t worry about cow urine. Not that it would harm you in any way if you did drink some.”

The dude had seemed to go blank for a few minutes after Lerner and Duncan had left, with Duncan exhorting him to drink it. He wasn’t sure why, but he trusted Duncan. Sort of. “How did you know I was thinking that?” he asked Spellman.

“It was written all over your face,” Spellman said mildly. “Or somewhere.” He went blank again, like someone had cut the power to him.

Hendricks started to move toward the door. Arch would be here in minutes, and he needed to be outside. If Lerner and Duncan could handle this, fine, and all the better, but … if they couldn’t …

He grunted in pain as his ribs screamed at him. “Fuck it,” he said. There was no way he’d be ready for a fight, not in his present condition. He’d limp into a greater and get his head popped off like a cork, just the way Lerner had said.

Hendricks pulled the stopper out of the bladder and upended it, chugging it down. He caught movement from Spellman out of the corner of his eye, like someone turned the power on to him again. He looked pleased. Unsettlingly so.

* * *

Lerner had shot off on a back road at a ninety-degree angle, tires skidding across gravel. He could hear the heavy thunks and tiny plinks of rock hitting the car, and wondered how much it would cost to fix it at the body shop. The accountants would have his ass in a sling for that. Maybe literally.

Duncan was reading the map next to him, and his usual calm was gone out the fucking window. “Uhhhhmmm … it looks like there’s a turnoff up ahead …”

“Left or right, numbnuts?” Lerner asked, gritting his teeth as he felt the traction slip on a curve.

“Right, I think,” Duncan said.

“You
think
?” The rain was pounding the windshield, trees were zipping by outside. They were blurred by the lines of water falling down the windows.

“Yeah,” Duncan said. “This map … I’m not sure how accurate it is.”

Lerner felt the car slalom around a lazy S-curve and tried to keep from jerking the wheel too hard to compensate. “Lovely.”

“It might be easier to read it if the car wasn’t bumping all over the place.”

“You’re just eighteen different kinds of fucking helpful, aren’t you?” Lerner asked. He kept going, though.

* * *

Erin saw the sedan make the turnoff toward the lower dam and followed. Lucia was still sitting pale next to her, and she tried to give her a reassuring smile. They were ahead far enough that they might reasonably be able to claim they didn’t see her coming up on them with sirens wailing and lights flashing. She needed to get closer.

The brothel thing could wait. Right now she had her teeth into something else, and oddly enough—and she did kick herself when she thought of it this way—it felt like her future depended on catching them.

* * *

“Get in the car!” Arch called out the window as he slowed down. Hendricks was already in the parking lot, running through the wash. Arch was pretty sure the parking lot had dried out yesterday after the rain quit, but it was already back to flooding. Bad sign for the town. Maybe an omen of things to come.

Arch watched out the open window as Hendricks hustled toward the Explorer, splashing all the way and holding on to his hat. His black drover coat seemed to be keeping the rain off him, but his black cowboy hat looked like it was soaked and drooping just a little after being out for only a few seconds. It was a gully-washer, no doubt, and he hit the switch to roll the window up as Hendricks opened the door, jumped in and slammed it shut in seconds. The cowboy took his hat off and shook it toward the floorboard. “Let’s go,” he said, and Arch obliged, gunning it.

* * *

Gideon had gotten the guy’s heart, but he was so caught up in the moment that he hadn’t bothered with a scream. By the time he remembered he needed it, the security guard was already dead. Double damn.

He threw the body into the woods with ease, like he was Cubs fan tossing a baseball. It landed about ten feet from him, in some underbrush, with a cracking noise. Not like it mattered. The guy wasn’t going to feel it anymore anyway. Gideon hadn’t even caught his name as he passed through.

He’d saved him for later. Stored away that pain, that screaming agony in his essence. He’d never done that before, preferring to pleasure himself right when he got them. It was a curious feeling, a churning, constant arousal inside.

He flipped the gate switch in the guardhouse, got back in the car and started up the road again. He could feel the pleasure from this kill welling up inside him, stirring. He was already rock-hard, but he didn’t have time to satiate himself, not now. His erection caused his cargo pants to tent, just a little, as he sat in the rental car and pushed his foot to the pedal. The engine in the sedan whined as he started up the hill’s incline. He could see the dam out his window.

There were more souls coming, and soon. He could almost taste the anticipation of having so many of them to chew on, to savor. He’d have a feast of them to satiate himself with, and he could jerk off for weeks on what he’d get once the dam went down.

* * *

Lerner hit the brakes when they got to a guardhouse. There was a fence blocking them from going any further, and the gate looked strong enough to at least fuck up the front of the car, if not stop them. Lerner wasn’t all that sanguine about trying to bust through. When he saw the security guard come walking out, he suspected he might not need to.

Lerner slowed the car and crept it up to the gate. Stared down the slate grey hood as the rain washed over it, and rolled his window down halfway. Big, heavy drops of water drenched his left arm and started to soak the pleather interior of the door panel.

“How y’all doing?” the guard asked by way of greeting. An awning above the guardhouse was shielding him but not by much. His security uniform was already showing signs of dampness.

“Anyone come through here lately?” Lerner asked. “Anyone who didn’t have permission?”

The guard just sort of frowned at him, like he didn’t get asked penetrating questions by total strangers every day. “No. You’re the only ones to come through here in hours. All the employees go up to the top of the dam; we just block the bottom because the Department of Homeland Security says we gotta.” He shrugged. “Terrorists, y’know.”

“Oh, fuck,” Lerner said. He could see the dam up ahead, barely, in the distance, through the rain, over the trees. He put the car in reverse without even bothering to roll the window up or say so much as Thank you to the guard, who was looking pretty damned confused at this point.

“He wasn’t lying,” Duncan said, “and he didn’t have any kind of gap to indicate he was being fiddled with.”

“I figured that out on my own, genius,” Lerner snapped. “Clearly this Gideon bastard is going to the top of the dam.” He smacked the wheel lightly, careful not to do it any harm. Which he could, easily. “Why didn’t you steer us to the top?”

Duncan stared down at the map, concentrating on it like it contained the secret to all existence. Lerner had read in a human book once that the answer was forty-two. It made about as much sense as anything else he’d heard. “I don’t know how to read a map. I just followed the road that led to Tallakeet Dam—”

“Well, find another one!” Lerner exploded. “Fuck,” he breathed as he finished his one-eighty and saw flashing lights of blue and red blurring as the windshield wipers cleared the rain and another torrent covered it again.

* * *

“Got him boxed in,” Erin said, almost to herself. The rain was coming down hard now, and she wasn’t looking forward to getting out in it to write this ticket. But part of her was.

“What if he runs?” Lucia asked. Erin glanced at her; the girl looked terrified. And she really did look like a girl right now, not a woman, damned sure not a hooker. She looked like a scared girl, no more than twenty-two. Older than Erin, sure, but … fearful. For whatever reason.

“They only run on
COPS
and in movies,” Erin said. She said it with enough feeling that she saw Lucia relax a little. She had a little of the perfume smell from the whorehouse on, and Erin had to admit the fragrance was kind of growing on her. Maybe she’d ask what kind it was later.

* * *

“It’s Deputy Harris,” Duncan reported, matter-of-factly.

“Yes, I fucking know it’s her,” Lerner snapped again. He could feel his essence bulging him at the seams. He did not have time for this shit, not now. Maniac on the loose, what did you do? Lerner shifted the car into drive and gunned it. The sedan slipped a little as he darted to the right and went off the road.

“Home office is going to be pissed,” Duncan said. Lerner could hear the strain in his voice, and did not give a single flying fuck.

“Let them come do this job,” Lerner said as he slid on the grass just off the road. He cut it close and watched his driver’s side mirror smash into Deputy’s Harris’s as he blew past her and skidded back onto the road.